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The Misadventures Of Trying To Play 'Wolfenstein: The New Order' Via PS4 Digital Download

Like so many others today, I wanted to check out Wolfenstein: The New Order as the game has received surprisingly good reviews and I’ve been looking for a reason to use my next generation consoles for well over a month now since Titanfall/Infamous were released.

That said, I didn’t want to put on pants and drive to my local Gamestop to get it.

This is part of a recent trend of mine where I try to “embrace the future” by assembling a digital catalog of games, ignoring retail altogether. It’s what MicrosoftMicrosoft obviously wanted before they changed their minds about nearly everything regarding the Xbox One, and though SonySony stuck with discs from the get-go, they obviously wouldn’t mind cutting out the middleman either.

Storage space is an obvious issue. I’ve resigned myself to simply deleting old games I no longer play from my hard drive to make room for new ones, assuming I won’t get screwed if I ever have to redownload them. At first 500 GBs felt like a lot on either system until you realized it was closer to 380 GB of available space, and then it became apparent that next-gen games were all going to be massive. Wolfenstein: New Order is over 50 GB by itself, and a huge percentage of my remaining space. If I can have more than seven or eight games downloaded at once per console, I’ll be pretty lucky.

I’ve downloaded games before, but my time trying to play Wolfenstein so far has been so comically frustrating, I figured it was worth chronicling here. It shows problems with this specific game, PS4′s download system (though Xbox One’s is also rough), and the concept of digital downloads on consoles overall. In short, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

We’ll start with the price, currently set at $60 despite the fact that there are no costs regarding Gamestop’s cut, materials of the physical disc or box, or transport of the merchandise to stores. You’re essentially paying a $10 or more “convenience fee” to be able to download the game from home, and that money goes directly into the developer’s pockets. Good for them, but no added financial benefit for you, the consumer. The problem is that console players are so well-trained to always pay $60 for new games, it doesn’t phase them, even if in digital form. I’m part of the problem, as I downloaded the game anyway and didn’t even bother to send a sternly worded letter to Sony. Hopefully digital prices will drop in the future, but there’s no sign of that happening en masse yet.

Then comes the download itself. The 51 GB file size seemed pretty daunting, and I knew it would likely be a few hours until I was actually able to play. I started downloading at 8 AM and left it running as I worked.

The problem with both Xbox One and PS4′s download system is that it doesn’t give you the rate of download. PS4 at least gives you estimated time remaining, but even that is wildly inaccurate. My timer went from a hard-to-believe 41 minutes to 1 hour to 2 hours. Then, when I came back maybe 50 minutes after I started, it was done. “Huh,” I thought, “This is going better than expected.”

After finishing up some work, I tried to play the game at 10 AM, but found I was still denied. The game was trying to download a pair of patches, and failing to do so. Both were about halfway downloaded, but kept dying as something was restricting them from completing. Finally, the first one finished about a half hour later, but the second struggled along like it was being dragged through digital mud.

Enter another problem. When PS4 fails to download something, it simply stops, and may or may not try again later at an unspecified point in time. What that meant for Wolfenstein was that for this last troublesome patch, I had to literally sit there with my controller hitting X to “retry” every five minutes. The PS4 would reconnect to the patch and download anywhere from nothing to 100 MB before dying again. In all, I probably had to restart the download about 25 times in order for the last 25% of the 4 GB patch to download. I literally couldn’t leave the room, or it would never get done.

At long last, the game was ready. I hopped in, and played through the main tutorial level that has you running around a large warplane, putting out fires and dumping cargo out the back. The plane crashes, I jump to another one, and I’m about to start the next area where hopefully I get to start shooting Nazis.

And then, an error.

“Content is currently unavailable. Please wait for it to install and try again.”

What the hell? I just spent forty five minutes playing patty-cake with my controller to make sure the last bit of data downloaded so I could start playing. I looked in my notifications to see if anything was still downloading. Nothing. I looked in the game information screen itself, which told me it was ready to go, and would only let me go back into the main menu of the game which would once again lead to the error screen.

Finally, I just Googled the error message and found a forum full of others who had similar issues. So what was happening?

Despite appearing like my 51 GB download finished lightning fast, I merely had downloaded enough of the game to start playing. How on earth was I supposed to know this? Since the active download didn’t appear in “downloads” or in the game info section itself, I literally had to go into the storage management of my PS4 and find Wolfenstein. The game info and storage info told me I had 51 GB downloaded, but it was only when I went into detailed storage info I finally found yet another progress screen. I’d only downloaded 8.6 GB out of 51, and it was ticking up by a MB or two a second. No download speed, no time remaining bar.

The problem here is twofold with both Sony and Wolfenstein itself. If I’ve downloaded nearly 20% of the game, I should be able to play more than 1% of it before hitting a brick wall. There’s no point to this “play as you download” system at all if I’m going to play for 15 minutes then have to wait another three hours for the rest of it. Now what do I do? Do I keep trying to resume the game every ten minutes to see if the next section is unlocked? Do I keep playing and constantly wonder when I’m going to be booted out of the game next?

And Sony is idiotic to hide this information so deeply in the bowels of the menus. How is the fact that I’m currently downloading a 51 GB game not in my downloads notification area? How does it not say that on the game tile itself? Why did I have to go to a forum to uncover what was going on here?

Sony wants to create the illusion that digital downloading is easy because you don’t have to wait five hours to play a game that comes with a massive file size. They don’t need to bother you with pesky information like background downloads because you’re playing what you’ve already downloaded and having a good time, right? If it worked like that, sure, but in this case the system backfired horribly leading me to almost delete and reinstall the game as a last resort as I couldn’t deduce what the hell was going on.

If the system worked as intended and I could indeed play the first 20% of the game when 20% was downloaded, that would be fine. It would be done downloading long before I ran out of available content. But whether it’s Sony’s fault or Wolfenstein’s, I was barely able to get past the tutorial before I ran out of rope.

I’m not picking on Sony. I’ve had similar problems with Xbox’s download system who somehow manages to put even less information on the screen regarding downloads and is constantly freezing patches and updates at 99% for interminable amounts of time. But still, this has been the most bizarre download attempt to date, and it will likely be close to five or six hours from my time of purchase to when I can play the game for real.

All of this, and I could have just driven two miles to Gamestop, picked up a disc, downloaded a patch, and have been on my way. If you want to move consoles to digital, the experience has to be far, far better than this. There’s a very long way to go before digital is the norm for Xbox One and PS4, and my wacky downloading adventure is a primary case study as to why that is.

Update (12:40 PM): Now I have 15 GB downloaded, and the game still won’t let me play past the tutorial. I’ve lost all sense of download progress as now that the GB are in double digits, the display just says 15/51GB with no indication of how fast the MB are ticking.

Contrary to what some are saying, my main problem isn’t with download speeds (though I do have a good internet connection at ~30Mbps). It’s with presentation of information (or lack thereof) on the PS4 and the failed notion of this “play as you go” system which allowed for no more than 15 minutes of play before needing an apparently much more massive chunk of the game to be done downloading. It may not be realistic to expect 20% of the game to be playable when 20% is downloaded, but certainly more than 1% should be if 30% is downloaded.

Update (4:13 PM): Now I’m at 20 GB out of 51. The problem does appear to have shifted to a download speed issue now, though my internet is working perfectly everywhere else, and I was absolutely downloading 3 MB a second on PS4 earlier today (a 30MPps connection is only as fast as wherever you’re downloading from, and most places have low limits). I won’t 100% say it’s on Sony’s end, but I don’t know what else would have slowed things down to a crawl if the board is all green on my end over here. On pace to start playing…tomorrow around lunch? I can’t say for sure. Needless to say, I’m not amused.

Update (7:09 PM): Finally restarted my PS4 to see if it would jump the download speed into gear. So far it’s still at 24GB/51 after the reset, and I have no way of knowing the speed because it doesn’t show MB any more. I just do not understand why this isn’t shown in Active Downloads. On the plus side, I’m now finally able to play past the tutorial, 11 hours later. We’ll see how far I get.

Update (8:13 AM): 24 hours after I began the download, I’m at 44GB/51 after leaving my PS4 on all night. I know next gen games are large, but Wolfenstein is particularly, ridiculously massive. The good news is that I was able to play for several hours unimpeded last night, so the download progress didn’t prove to be a factor after about the 50% complete mark. I mean, it almost took 12 hours to get there, but whatever. I still don’t understand the crawling download speed given the fact that my internet is fine and dandy on every other device, and was once much faster on PS4 itself. Theories include ISP throttling or a Sony bottleneck.

Update (12:10 PM): The saga ends with 28 hours of total download time. I’ve heard similar issues from others who normally don’t experience outrageous times like that. And hey, the game is good! Hopefully I’ll actually get to talk about that soon.

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At no point did you describe your network setup. Are you using Wi-Fi? If so, is it G or N? What download rate is your internet service 5Mbps, 10Mbps, 25 Mbps, or 50 Mbps? Maybe some of your problems are out of Sony’s control.

I have N and 50MBps service and it seemed to be downloading at a good clip for me when I left for work today.

He clearly said 30 Mbps, and it doesn’t matter if it is G or N. Both will do faster then that. G can do 53, so you aren’t gaining anything from N.

Also the limiting factor isn’t your internet it is the PSN. If you have 50 you still are downloading at about 2. The PSN doesn’t let you download very fast. The download speed is slow, because the game is new and a lot of people are downloading it. The only reason to have 50 is if you are using a lot of different sites at the same time. Even netflix max is like 8. People like to brag about how fast there internet is and 90% of the time aren’t using 10% of what they are paying for.

Who cares. 51GB is outrageous. Even if you have good internet speed, your ISP will likely bottleneck you when they see the bandwidth you’re using up. They do that all the time. Plus, with this “100% digital future,” everyone is forgetting about the end of net neutrality and the consequences of that. Time Warner and Comcast compete with Sony, so they will be doing whatever they can to make the experience miserable, and that means lowering speed for downloading PS4 games.

You aren’t going to get anywhere near that. G-standard routers can transmit information at around 54mbps but that speed only applies to transferring information internally within your own network such as transferring files from one computer to another on your network. Once you go onto the internet and request information from servers outside of your local area network then the download speed is dependent on your internet connection speed. N-standard can transmit roughly around 108mbps internally but the benefit in N standard is that it gives much better signal range so the PS4 is less likely to be hampered by low signal strength. Your download speed is also hampered by any other devices on the network (wired or wireless), I have no problem getting what I pay for in terms of internet speed. Do I get every single MB I pay for? No, but I get good enough.

But I agree with you, this is the reason I’m not for moving to all-digital. Even though I have a great internet (50 mbps download) I could still run into problems not caused by my connection. Their servers may not be able to handle all the people trying to download. I also don’t want to go all digital because of the experience. I love going down to Gamestop, chatting with the employees who are also gamers, and looking at the stuff they have there before picking up my game.

Meh . . . both the PS4 and Xbone are relatively new. They’ll fix these problems. Steam has been doing this for nearly a decade and their system works pretty darn good. And it includes things like pre-downloading. Able to start & stop easily, shows the rate, lets you to switch to different servers if it is not working good for you, etc.

Actually, you do have the added benefit of being able to play one copy of the game on two consoles at the same time. Anyone can play your digital content on your PS4 designated as your primary, and you can play on a different PS4 while logged into your account. It’s nice to be able to purchase one copy of a game and be able to play online co-op with my son when he’s using my primary system up in the gameroom and I’m logged in to my account on the console in my bedroom.

This is what I do. Granted, there is no resell value, but I can get PSN credit at a discount. So a $60 game costs me about $54, plus I get “2 copies”. Me and my buddy split the cost, so $27 each. If I bought and sold a physical copy, I’d be out $25-$35 after I sold it/traded it. It’s about the same cost, only I “keep” the digital.

I can’t speak for next gen consoles yet as I don’t own one, but I do this already with my Xbox 360 with all of my physical media. With the option to install games directly to the hard drive, the disc stops spinning shortly after the game boots up. If your console is opened up where you can access the drive contents without ejecting the disc, you can use that one disc on multiple consoles.

I know that this process isn’t very applicable at this point in the new generation since doing that voids any warranty that is on the console. And with the issues that the Xbox One has had with drives, it would be stupid to do. But if the process is the same on the Xbox One and/or the PS4, then physical media could even take away some measure of that advantage in the future.

You know, we can’t all afford to spend $1000+ to have two PS4s in one household.

Clearly, if you have no problems buying two systems then a paltry $60 probably isn’t an issue for you. Those of us with less discretionary income think that it’s logical and fair that a game without physical components could and should be slightly cheaper.

I think they should have given you a progress bar but if they would have and you would have had let’s say 5h to go you would have got pissed off again. “Come on Sony is slow!”. There can be problems with your connection speed as somebody mentioned it, the internet congestion and also the Sony server. Why you could play 1% of the game when you downloaded 20% of it? We are in the era of instant gratification. They had to give you something to keep you interested. Software does not work like “that”. It is not like grains that that you get 10% of a pound and then you can eat them as you could eat the whole pound. Probably they have to download the rendering engine first and then I am guessing the levels are only small files of megs that describe the object that need to be rendered by the rendering engine. … Maybe you should red up a little about how software works and the incredible amount of work that goes into a game before bashing… No I don’t work for Sony or the game company.

Downloading AAA games on the PS4 has been a nightmare for me. The PS Network is just so much slower than Live, and both are significantly slower than downloading games on Steam. It’s a shame that the Xbone is so much less powerful, because if all things were equal I’d much prefer to just download the games onto it, although I’d obviously quickly run out of space.

“We’ll start with the price, currently set at $60 despite the fact that there are no costs regarding Gamestop’s cut, materials of the physical disc or box, or transport of the merchandise to stores. You’re essentially paying a $10 or more “convenience fee” to be able to download the game from home, and that money goes directly into the developer’s pockets. ”

Hold on a second, the reason why I as a developer or publisher would opt to hold price on digital downloads is because you really don’t know how many time that title will be downloaded in it’s lifetime.

You could download this game today and your HDD could go bust. Then you’d have to download it again. There is cost associated with that infrastructure.

If publishers don’t hold price at $60 they may ding the customer for download fees.

That’s an interesting perspective. Would you then care to explain why digital downloads on PCs are so steeply discounted? Is there a significantly different cost infrastructure at play when data servers transmit packets to a PC versus a console? For recent examples, Thief via digital download on Steam cost $45, whereas it cost $60 on consoles. On the other hand, it appears Watch Dogs costs $60 regardless of the medium.

These pricing disparities or lack thereof appear to be influenced more by the publisher/developers behind the software than a simple “infrastructure” concern.

I’ve had issues downloading games (they seem to take forever). Leaving your PS4 on over night seems to be the solution. However, Final Fantasy: A Realm Reborn took a while to download, but I didn’t have to wait for a million patches like other games. So far FF has been a great experience with little waiting. It’s a new system so there are going to be a few issues…this seems like one of them…